Conviction in Slaying Linked to MLK Plot

Published 6:00 pm, Friday, February 28, 2003

A decades-old murder case that allegedly involved a failed plot to assassinate Martin Luther King Jr. ended with the conviction of a 72-year-old reputed Klansman.

Ernest Avants was convicted Friday in the 1966 slaying of a black sharecropper, a crime prosecutors say was carried out with the goal of luring King to southern Mississippi.

Avants, a stroke survivor, remained in his wheelchair as the verdict was read. Federal prosecutors said they won't seek the death penalty, meaning he faces up to life in prison at sentencing May 9.

Jesse White, the 65-year-old son of victim Ben Chester White, said after the verdict: "It's like being hungry for so, so long and you get a good meal under your belt. You're not so hungry any more."

The defense said it would appeal.

Avants had been acquitted of murder in a 1967 state trial, but the federal charge of aiding and abetting murder wasn't filed until years later when authorities realized recently White was killed on federal land.

Prosecutors said Avants and two white companions offered the 67-year-old White $2 and a soda to help them find a dog lost in the woods. White was driven to Homochitto National Forest, where he found himself staring into the barrel of an assault rifle. White's last words, prosecutors said, were: "Lord, what have I done to deserve this?"

Prosecutors told the jury 37 years could not wash away the horror of White's slaying and urged them not to let his killer go free.

"Tell Mr. White that you know there is no amount of time that can forgive this crime," prosecutor Paige Fitzgerald said.

The verdict was returned less than three hours after final arguments in the case and just three days after the trial began.

U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton said prosecutors used the same testimony as in the 1967 trial.

"The difference was the attitude of the jurors," Lampton said. "Hopefully it means the country will stop looking at Mississippi like we were still in the '60s."

The case was the latest in a string of Civil Rights Era cases that have been reopened in recent years and prosecuted.

Last May, an Alabama jury convicted an aging former Klansman of murder for the 1963 church bombing that killed four black girls in Birmingham. And in 1994, Byron De La Beckwith was convicted in the 1963 death of civil rights activist Medgar Evars in Mississippi.

Prosecutors in Avants' trial pinned much of their case on statements made by the late James Lloyd Jones, who told authorities years ago he was there when White was murdered. Jones' state trial ended in a mistrial.

According to Jones' confession, which was read aloud to the jury, both Avants and Claude Fuller drove White to the forest and killed him there. Fuller, who is now dead, shot White 17 times with a rifle; Avants then shot White in the head with a shotgun.

"Fuller said he had orders from higher up (in the Ku Klux Klan). That he wanted to pull them off that march in Jackson. They thought maybe they might get him (White) and old Martin Luther King Jr.," Jones said.

The civil rights leader, scheduled to visit Jackson that year for a march, didn't come to southern Mississippi. He was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., two years later.

The judge barred hate-crime evidence, but prosecutors noted the victim was black and the three suspects were white. The defense argued the case hinged largely on statements by a long-dead suspect they said was a chronic liar.

Defense attorney Tom Royals said that it was difficult to defend a case so old and that his client was not surprised by the verdict.